Sunday, January 4, 2015

Day 1: Change is Here

The 2015 kickoff has come and gone.

Recycle Rush

This is a drastic change in FRC's recent history. Alliances won't be interacting with each other very much in this game; there won't even be a winner and loser of each match. For Recycle Rush, FIRST has also removed the bumpers and size requirements, permitted the use of an unlimited number of motors, and added a number of other major changes to the way games have been running.

We spent 3 hours going over all the rules and trying to revise a lot of our conventional ideas for how FRC games should be played. While brainstorming possible strategies, the irrelevance of defense was mourned.

After strategizing, playing with the game pieces for a bit, and getting an idea of how some of the main methods of point collection should work, we moved on to defining robot tasks. There is a variety of potential courses of action in this game, and we wanted to start looking at possible prototypes to accomplish them.

The complete removal of the importance of a strong drive train is another one of this year's biggest changes. It will always be important to have a reliable and effective drive train, but now a strong drive train that can get out of T-bone pins isn't needed. A simple 4 CIM drive train with a large gear reduction to allow for a moderate top speed of 8-9 ft/s should be all that is necessary for this game.

We made several rough prototypes of passive end effectors to be used for manipulating the totes and recycling containers.

Reorienting the containers also seems like an important task in this game. Flipping around the totes seems less useful since there are so many totes available for use.